Estoy Embarazado

Heheheheheh...

This is one of my favorite puns in Spanish-English mistranslation.

Anyway, today while orchestrating one of our now famous whirlwind prenatal clinics in a tiny village around town we had a local comadrona come asking for us to attend a birth at one of the homes down the road. Catherine, the professor and midwife, told us to choose a number between one and ten... Meant to be...

I followed her and the comadrona into a bedroom where a woman lay flat and with contractions her mother-in-law pushed on her fundus. She looked exhausted and strained. We auscultated fetal tones, palpated, sat with her through a few contractions, encouraged fluid and movement. Had her mother-in-law help us to remove the extra belt she was wearing around her abdomen (perhaps to also "help" push on the fundus, but really these seem to just block complete movement of the baby--we've seen lots of transverse and oblique presentations in the clinics). The comadrona asked Catherine to check her cervix. Only 4 or 5 centimeters. Definitely not time to be pushing, sheesh.

We left, Catherine saying, in all her years she has never been asked to a home birth in Guatemala. While it could have been considered an honor, it felt more like the family wanted all these foreign medic people to offer them some other standard of care than they assumed they were already receiving. They asked for an IV, and more gloves, and for us to stay.

We gave them reassurance, a bundle of onesies and receiving blankets and moved on to the next village for our scheduled prenatal clinic set-up. Our cultural broker, the local Health Promoter, told us that although the family may have wanted us to stay, the comadrona would not be paid for the birth if so, and these women put in their time and expertise working with each woman and family, we think she was being polite in front of us and the family. The woman has already had many babies, and she was going to do fine.

Sure enough, we got word by the end of the prenatal clinic at the next village, she gave birth at 4pm (2 hours ago) and everyone is great.

Birth is most exciting and wonderful, when least eventful and interrupted eh?

Dia de los diabeticos!

Not Dia de los muertos..

This morning was our first clinic day, unless I can count our last night´s late call to the hotel where we stay asking if we were "the nurses" and could we come help another foreign volunteer with her suspicious and menacing mozzie bites. I brought my first aid goods, including not the norm stuff like a vial of chloroprep and of course my arnica and calendula homeopathics. This poor girls' wounds made me want to become a fan of DEET. They were boiling, exploading, oozing and inflamming a decent surface area.

Anyway, this morning at 6am we were up and whoever wanted--all of us--trekked to the clinica where Jesus-Antonio consults with the local Type 2's. We did many a manual blood pressure check and when the physician came out to tell the remainder handful of folks that he couldn't see anymore of them because they had just run out of test strips, I interrupted and supplied my own. There were maybe 5 or 6 people left, and they had been waiting for hours. I can't sustain another diabetic clinic with my own supply, but I was glad that I had a match with so many different kinds of machines and strips out there.

¡Me encanta hablando Español! It was so fun to speak to everyone today, I got real friendly and chatty. It feels great to be back in a Spanish speaking country, my limited Spanish goes incredibly further than my Thai, Indonesian, or Kiswahili!! Now however, I'm going to try to pick up some Kaqchikel, the local Maya dialect.

San Lucas Toliman on the Lake of Atitlan in southern Guatemala is one of the most beauitful lakeside mountain villages I have seen. Food served by the old Father from Minnesota who has lived here for 45 years is not so good. I'm going to sneak some rice and beans and tortillas instead.

"Our Culture is Our Resistance"

I LOVE having a bag full of the following items in my living room:

* receiving blankets, onesies, hats, teeny socks, and sleepers (x 40)

* stethoscope, sphygmomanometer, fetoscope, penlight and non-sterile gloves

* bottles and bottles of ibuprofen, prenatal vitamins, ferrous gluconate and syringes

* scrubs, self-filtering water bottles, arnica, expensive camera, sketchbook and journal (the real paper kind, not a computer)

* Call the Midwife, A Midwife's Tale, Where There Are No Doctors, a Spanish dictionary and The Glass Castle

* poncho from a friend who went last year for the afternoons when it drenches and pours

* an expectation that I will somehow get to experience a sweat lodge with one of the traditional Mayan midwives, comadronas, and learn more Spanish.

* passport

Wish me luck on yet another guaranteed-to-change-your-life-once-in-a-lifetime-experience-cultural-immersion-adventure.

PS. if you ever find yourself capable of acquiring any of the following items, I decided that I could probably use a regular income of these for future endeavors: onesies, receiving blankets, non-sterile gloves (smalls), prenatal vitamins, iron, ibuprofen, arnica (homeopathic), amoxicillin, metformin, glucophage, one touch test strips, or urine dip sticks. Save 'em for me, I promise to spread them around the world.

Cheers!

Photographs from the amazing and beautiful book Our Culture is Our Resistance: repression, refuge, and healing in Guatemala by Jonathan Moller.